Girls vs. Boys: The Hooker and the Funeral

Professional disasters both potential and actual were everywhere in this week’s episodes of Girls and Looking, as our young(-ish) city folks got fired, considered risky new business ventures, embarrassed themselves in front of new bosses, and were offered something big only to have it pretty immediately taken away. Oh, and Marnie slept with Ray! Yes. Maybe it’s best to start there.

This season of Girls has not been terribly kind to the once sure-footed Marnie. There was, of course, the mortification of the Edie Brickell video, which led to her quitting her job at the coffee shop. Now she’s gone and had impulsive, definitely ill-advised sex with Ray, after showing up to his apartment and demanding that he tell her everything that’s wrong with her. That whole setup was a little strange—I guess I never really made much of Ray and Marnie’s contentious relationship in the past—but as a surprising way to pull Marnie back toward the center of the show, it was effectively startling. It was hard to tell just how big the repercussions of their immediately regretted tryst will be, but I’d have to imagine Shoshanna will be involved somehow and that it will, sadly, mean more embarrassing torment for Marnie, who’s fallen pretty far from the gallery-girl grace of season one. I’m not sure when she became such a miserable person, but her devolution at least feels more organic than Hannah’s sudden turn toward sociopathy.

Ah, Hannah. Of course she went to David’s funeral, and of course she was mightily rude, asking David’s grieving wife (yes, despite an obvious taste for the rougher sex, he was married to a woman) if she had any info about the status of her book. Jennifer Westfeldt was a fun bit of casting here, as she herself is a filmmaker whose tone can quickly go from sweet to sharp. Though Hannah was acting pretty ghoulish at the funeral, gawking at literary luminaries like Zadie Smith and pestering a widow about a silly e-book, it initially appeared to have paid off. She got set up with a meeting at another publishing house and seemed on her way to escaping this whole tragedy relatively unscathed.

In a funny, odd scene, Hannah met with the new publishers and actually managed to charm them. And they gave her some very good news: they don’t publish e-books out of some sense of snobbiness, and thus wanted to make Hannah’s memoirs a “real” book, much to Hannah’s giggling, giddy delight. Here, finally this season, was a time when Hannah’s blunt and self-obsessed honesty was funny instead of depressing, maybe because we could sense that this whole thing was too good to be true. Watching her appalling reaction to the news that the old publisher owned her book for three years and thus her exciting new deal was not going to happen was oddly satisfying. It seemed like pretty fair punishment for all Hannah’s rudeness to her father, her petulance and entitlement about making it as a writer, and of course for her almost flippant reaction to David’s death. She’s now had the promise of literary success twice dangled in front of her only to have it snatched away, and while of course I have a little sympathy for her as a writer, it’s mostly a relief to watch her finally get some measure of comeuppance.

Things also reached a turning point with Caroline, Adam’s erratic sister. Though she tried to put an upbeat spin on Hannah’s bad news, trying to comfort and encourage her, Hannah didn’t want to hear it. Her generosity quickly ran out and she screamed at Caroline to leave her apartment. While she was perhaps being a bit harsh to a person who had just tried, rather sweetly if a bit cluelessly, to comfort her about the loss of the book deal, it’s understandable that Hannah would be sick of Adam and Caroline’s constant fighting. And it’s not just fighting. There is a creepy air of flirtation to it, an unsettling note that the show addressed this episode, not walking us up too close to the icky issue, but certainly getting within striking distance. Who knows what’s going to happen with Caroline—by episode’s end, she was out wandering somewhere and Adam went looking for her—but however it plays out, it was nice to feel the show setting up some kind of dramatic arc.

The narrative energy started to pick up on Looking as well, with real things happening for our three leads. Agustín got fired from his job as an artist’s assistant for being too critical of her work, and while his boyfriend encouraged him to show his own stuff at a friend’s gallery, a chance encounter had him considering escort work instead. Yeah, this being a sexy, shaggy version of San Francisco, Agustín met a handsome, bearded sex worker at a coffee shop just after getting fired. So the rentboy—well, rentman—gave him his card, and it kinda seems like Agustín is considering calling him not for a date but maybe for some career advice? Could be! It would definitely be a more salacious turn than I saw this show taking, but an interesting arena to explore.

Patrick, meanwhile, went to a big work party on an aircraft carrier, and though determined to be loose and have a good time, managed to embarrass himself by hitting on his new boss before he knew he was his new boss. This fellow, Kevin, is played by Russell Tovey, a charming British actor who manages to be both smoldering and cutely teddy-bear-ish. Rude, or blunt, in the way that British people can be rude, or blunt, Kevin initially appeared not to like Patrick much. But at the end of the episode it seemed that he was maybe just testing him somehow? And maybe even flirting with him? As with Augustín’s storyline, this could either turn into a sorta soapy guy-sleeps-with-his-boss sort of a thing, or it could take a milder course and simply be about a flirtation that everyone involved would be wise to not act on. Either way, I’m intrigued.

Most interesting, though, is Murray’s development. Having partly exorcised the demon of his ex-boyfriend last week, he’s now focused on the future, making plans to start his own restaurant, even though he doesn’t have any investors and can’t even get a chef friend onboard. There’s a lightly despondent honesty to the way that Murray seems to feel the increasing limits of his age—he’s too young to be settled but maybe too old to be a reckless dreamer. And now that he’s met the older, wiser San Francisco “institution” played by Scott Bakula—who gives off such weary, welcoming intelligence and kindness in this role—I’m hoping that Looking will get into the dynamics of aging in a culture that is largely pretty age-phobic. It is of course entirely possible that Bakula’s character will turn out to be a creeper in florist’s clothing, but I’m hoping he instead becomes a love interest.

Both shows seem to be finding their narrative footing as they approach the midway point of their seasons, which is encouraging. I don’t think Girls is completely out of the woods where its newfound sourness is concerned, but at least Hannah has been met with some just desserts, Marnie has returned to the fold to some degree, and Jessa—I forgot to mention Jessa—might be getting a job at a children’s clothing store. What if a proximity to babies is all she needs to soften her up a bit, like some weird millennial version of Diane Keaton’s character in Baby Boom? I’d watch that! (Sure she babysat some in season one, but she spent most of her time flirting with the kid's dad.) Looking is also setting up some interesting plot potential, but ultimately Girls wins the week by doing a necessary bit of course correction. They’re still a bunch of jerks, but this week they started looking more like the jerks we knew and loved in the previous two seasons. Maybe the earlier part of this season was just something of a quiet quarter-life crisis. It happens, or happened, to the best of us.